Tag Archives: Networking

4Networking

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I’ve recently become Marketing Assistant for my local 4Networking group in Bridgwater, Somerset.

4Networking is a great way to meet other small businesses in your local area, it’s great to meet potential suppliers and clients. One of the main points to remember, is that it doesn’t matter if there is no-one in the room who is going to buy from you, it’s more about who they know. For example, I’ve met several businesses, printers, accountants etc. – I work with businesses from start-up stage, through to taking on their 50th employee – So they always need a printing company and an accountants – So I can pass on their details.

In business, people buy from people. No matter how brilliant your product might be, or how cheap it is. If you don’t like someone, it’s very unlikely your going to buy from them. How many times have you been into a shop, had an unfriendly or rude shopkeeper serve you and never returned?

How about phoning a potential supplier, leaving several messages and they never got back to you. You are unlikely to return, or recommend them to anyone else.

So you must always remember this, you are your business. Meet, Like, Know & Trust. That’s the 4N way!

Of course there are plenty of business networking groups out there, it depends what type of person you are and who your ideal customers are. For example there is BNI, Federation of Small Businesses, Women in Business, Simply Networking.. The list goes on and on. Of course there are even networking groups that are market specific, some have very strict rules and some are very social. Most groups allow you to try them out, before you pay any high membership or joining fees, I would highly recommend this.

Quick Reminder about DNS & DHCP

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Hi All,

I have recently had an issue with a clients ADSL line, which decided to be a right pain, it usually had around 4mbps, then one week it decided to drop down to dial-up speed. It was absolutely awful, very difficult to do anything, when they have an office with 30 workstations chugging away.

We raised a ticket with the ISP in question and long-story short, we had to get a new line installed, it turns out the line was damaged somewhere between the building and the exchange.

So now that we were presented with a new IP range, we had to reset lots of devices, printers, scanners, access points and of course the servers, proxy server and static-ip PC’s.

All the DHCP PC’s would automatically get the new IP once we had change the scope on the DHCP server, so we thought.

But it didn’t and the reason is, that you must remember to restart both the DNS and DHCP services otherwise the Microsoft Server 2008 will not use the new scope!

WAN Load Balancing

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I recently had a client come to me who needed to find a way of increasing their overall WAN connection speed. They are part of a large membership organisation which means that every member has a VPN connection to their central office, whilst this was great 10 years ago, now everyone uses the internet a lot more, so having those extra hops to the outside world and extra security permissions which don’t allow them to use OWA or remote web workplace is a real downside. So, I was asked to come up with a solution that would allow them to have a new internet connection, using an LLU ISP, so that they could get a much faster connection speed. I started to have a look on the internet and spoke to a couple of colleagues to see what solutions were out there, unfortunately I couldn’t find many solutions that would allow me to connect a device to the network without modifying ports or settings on the existing VPN connection, which we are unable to do. Eventually I found out about the Peplink Balance devices, after reading through their documentation and looking at their videos it seemed like a very good offering, it provided me with the ‘drop-in’ configuration and allowed me to install more than just the one WAN device as my clients internet availability grows.

I ordered a Peplink Balance 30, which priced at under £500 is a great buy. The device is extremely easy to configure, you simply need to setup your new WAN internet connection and connect your Peplink device to your router, then connect your laptop to the LAN port on the Peplink device. Simply login to the control panel and follow the on-screen instructions, you can setup load balancing, port forwarding and other outbound policies. You could even setup a Policy that prioritised all CEO’s traffic above the rest of the company. I needed to setup the device to ensure all VPN traffic was sent through WAN 2 which was the VPN connection, so I simply created an outbound policy that took any source IP/Subnet traffic and requests for their central HQ server IP, enforced the traffic over WAN 2 and clicked apply. It’s a simple as that, of course there are many other settings you can play around with, such as limiting bandwidth to certain departments, only allowing the marketing team to use WAN 3, the possibilities are endless!